Emergency Response Is the Radio Promotion That Matters

With the floods in Texas, I thought it would be important to touch on these kinds of events and how we respond.

At some point in recent history, I was asked to compile a list of the “10 Best Radio Promotions” based entirely on my subjective opinion. An excellent question. How would you answer?

When I looked at my list, I realized that only two could be defined as “contests.” The rest of the list were stations reacting quickly and decisively to news stories or events, ie: being topical. And several of them were disasters or other tragedies.

Great stations have seminal moments where they stuck themselves on the Radio Map and never looked back. And rarely have these moments been contests. 102 Jamz in Greensboro? It was their response to Hurricane Andrew when the morning guy drove a semi of supplies down to Miami and garnered a front-page (color) photo of him distributing the supplies to people who were living in parks after their homes collapsed during the storm.

Wild in San Francisco? 48 hours after the LA earthquake, the station flew two 737s full of bottled water to Southern California and distributed it (with the help of Power 106) to people who were sweltering in the heat with no running water. The cost? Zero. The Promotion Director made one call to the airline and got the planes.

97.9 The Boxx in Houston? Also following the LA Earthquake, they collected water and drove eighteen semis to San Bernardino. 

As I have stressed multiple times before, what you want is tangible.

Most Radio disaster relief isn’t. When I text a code to some giant black hole charity, can I visualize it actually getting to people who need it? Rarely. And by the way, there are some outstanding charities like the Matthew 25: Ministries that are transparent and will be very upfront with where the money is going.

But still, at the end of the day, if we can’t get more than 4% of people to try to win $1000, how many people are going to take out their plastic, click a link, and send MONEY to someone just because we asked them? Not many.

That’s one reason why collecting pennies and spare change will work. In the case of KZIA in Cedar Rapids and “Pennies From Heaven,” they raised $29,000 – mostly in pennies – after a Gulf hurricane. Pennies have no value to us, which is why we have coffee cans full of them in our closets.

The other problem with our relief efforts is that there’s a Beginning (soliciting), a Middle (collecting) but no end. There’s no completion. No payoff. 

When a tornado nailed Moore, Oklahoma, and wiped out their water plant, KDWB in the Twin Cities:

• Set up in a grocery store parking lot and started soliciting donations of bottled water, the very next morning
• Filled four trucks
• Sent Carson from The Dave Ryan Show on a ride-along to cover the journey south

So, I detoured my morning commute and went and bought a flat of bottled water and donated it. Two days later, I listened as it was being handed out to people who had lost their access to fresh water.

And the trucks were free, courtesy of an employee’s father, who owned a beer distributor and had a fleet.

In Kansas City, following a Florida hurricane, they simply got on the air and asked for truckers to help… and got seven semis.

My clients, following Katrina, drove over 100 trucks from all over the country to the disaster zone. Newcap in Edmonton had a hook: teddy bears. You had thousands and thousands of kids who’d been evacuated and were living in shelters in Texas, which is pretty traumatizing. They ended up collecting over four hundred thousand stuffed animals and driving them to Texas.

So you want to collect money? Cool. Money is good. Zero in on someone/thing that needs the cash. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was a church that lost its roof in a tornado. Not only did they lose the roof… they’d lost all the toys they’d collected for underprivileged kids. One of the talents at 95.7 Jamz got on the air and mixed for close to two days until they hit their goal.

There. That was easy. (Says the guy who didn’t stay up for two days mixing.)

Playola or selling requests is another great cash infusion methodology and something that Hubbard in Cincinnati has done multiple times. I always go online and ‘buy’ “Fascinated” by Company B. It’s a jam.

With Katrina, one of the Canadian clusters sold close to $100,000 in requests over a weekend. You could request a song for $97. You could block a request for $197. So, if I don’t want to hear Four Non-Blondes requested by Ed “coming up in a few,”  I can squash that sucker for $197.

$100,000. You aren’t ever going to come remotely close to that with a link on your site.

And there’s auto-posts and contesting.

Repeat after me: No one will ever in a million years care about “Rachel Bilson hints at an ‘OC’ reboot!” or “Cardi B’s Keto Diet has people talking!” And adding exclamation marks isn’t going to increase their interest. 

It would be good to have a system in place that can take down these insipid posts when tragedy strikes. With the Pulse shooting in 2016, iHeart in Orlando was able to get access to their own social media (ya think?) and lose the stupid pop gossip stuff and start posting info as it unfolded in the early morning hours. 

We mock our listeners, but they’re perceptive. They’re BS detectors are strong. Following the Sandy Hook shooting, 72 hours later, and while the nation reeled, a station in Hartford (48 miles away) had not only not acknowledged it, but was unleashing a tsunami of autoposts on their Facebook page. After one particularly stupid “Are (B Level Celeb) and (C Level Celeb)’s on-set sparks real?!” post, a listener actually commented, “What the f**k is wrong with you people?”

Sometimes, not doing something is better. That can happen with contests. 

There was a quadruple cop slaying in Edmonton. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen in Canada. How big of a news story was it? I was two thousand miles away in Toronto, and all network television got preempted for the story.

The Newcap station in Edmonton was four days away from completing their $25,000 Fugitive contest and pulled it, citing that there are times for fun and games and there are times to suspend the contests and focus on the community. The audience’s reaction was, according to Steve Jones, the single most positive response that he’d ever seen a station receive. And, of course, there were three angry listeners.

Again, so few people play our contests that NOT doing one for a few days is really not that big of a deal. Stop overthinking things.

Radio can remain relevant and engaging by taking the time to be decisive and compelling when these things occur. It’s the stuff that Sirius can’t do.

No Dumpage this week because this is honestly way more important.